Ronnie O'Sullivan's Snooker 2007

A confession: we're the most fairweather of snooker fans. Well, as fairweather as you can be for a sport played indoors.

For 50 weeks of the year, we couldn't give a fig for ball-clacking baize action. But come the World Championship, we're glued to the TV, hypnotised by big breaks and loud waistcoats.

Player One is hoping to capitalise on the temporary fervour of casual fans like ourselves, as well as proper snooker buffs, with Ronnie O'Sullivan's Snooker 2007. It's the follow-up to last year's excellent Ronnie O'Sullivan Snooker and with only the unimpressive World Snooker Championship to compete with this year, it's well positioned to hold onto its title of top mobile snooker game.

Happily, this new Ronnie game has been given a rocket-powered overhaul since his mobile debut last year. There are still basic options, such as the ability to play a Quick Match with six, 10 or 15 reds on the table (the latter is 'proper' snooker), and a pass-the-handset multiplayer mode.

There's also a Practice mode to refine your potting skills, and a Survival mode that lets you try trick shots and time challenges – where you have to pot a certain number of balls within a time limit. If you want to pick up your phone and play a quick frame or two, it's perfect.

The actual snooker is great, too. In real life, Ronnie is known for the blistering pace of his play, and this mobile game keeps true to that spirit. Three clicks is all you need to aim, set spin and power, and shoot. You can blaze a trail around the table like Ronnie in his pomp, or spend time painstakingly lining up snookers like... well, most of the other pro snooker players.

The graphics are good too. Aiming takes place using a clear top-down viewpoint. You can switch to various 3D views from round the table, but if we're honest, 2D is much more effective. Once you take the shot, the viewpoint flicks to a more atmospheric over-the-pocket camera, for TV-style pots (or misses). This slick presentation runs throughout the game, allowing you to watch snappy replays at the end of every break.

All this would already be enough to make Ronnie O'Sullivan's Snooker 2007 the best mobile snooker sim. But icing on the cake is the Career mode, which sees you (as an unknown Ronnie) working your way up through gritty East End snooker clubs, hustling opponents to win cash and respect.

This involves actually walking around 2D snooker halls and challenging locals to games – either full matches, time challenges or trick shot contests. The actual interaction is on the simplistic side, but it's neatly done, and gives you something to get your teeth into besides the other snooker modes. It's a worthy inclusion.

We've only got two niggles about Ronnie O'Sullivan's Snooker 2007. The first is that once you've started Career mode, you can't play any other mode – Multiplayer for example – without erasing your Career save game from the memory. That's annoying.

Secondly, the cushions seem a bit springy – the balls appear to gain speed when they hit them, foiling our attempts at gentle cushion-nudging snookers.

We've noticed the same thing on other mobile snooker and pool games, so it could be a problem with implementing realistic table-physics in the restricted file-size of a mobile game. Or the developers could have it right, and it's just that the pub tables we play on in the real world are too beer-sodden to rebound balls properly. Like we said, it's a niggle at most, and you soon learn to live with it.

Anyway, these complaints don't take the shine off what's definitely the classiest mobile snooker game money can buy. At the time of writing, it's too early to say if Ronnie will win this year's real-life World Championship. But on mobile, his status as top dog is unchallenged.

Ronnie O'Sullivan's Snooker 2007

The best load of old balls we've played on a phone
Score
Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge
Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)